My head hurts. My heart hurts worse.
Liam clawed his way back to consciousness. Floated in something warm. Weightless. Should've been comfortable, like a hot bath after a long day, except his heart was trying to punch its way out of his ribcage like a demented jackhammer.
Then he felt it—that foreign something worming into his chest. Hot. Cold. Both. Neither. Drilling deeper with each heartbeat.
Stop. Drilling.
His eyes snapped open.
The disorientation hit first. Then suffocation. Something heavy pressed down on him from all sides. He thrashed. Dim light leaked through gaps above. He twisted harder, shoving at dead weight until gravity gave up and everything toppled off him in a graceless avalanche of limbs that weren't his.
Liam collapsed flat on his back, gasping.
Tall grass swayed against an orange sunset. He blinked at it.
When the hell did I end up in a field?
Last thing he remembered: pandemic lockdown, cooking rice, scrolling for something to watch. The usual. A perfectly mundane Thursday for a perfectly boring twenty-eight-year-old man who'd never wronged anyone, paid his taxes on time, and separated his recycling like a responsible citizen.
So naturally, the universe had drop-kicked him into—
The smell hit him. Copper. Rust. Meat gone bad.
Blood.
Liam jerked upright. Slipped. His limbs folded like wet noodles and he crashed back down.
A corpse stared at him.
Dead guy. Suit. Dilated pupils locked on Liam's face with the enthusiasm of someone who'd recently vacated the premises.
The chill started at his tailbone and sprinted up his spine.
More bodies. Scattered through the tall grass like someone had played a very aggressive game of lawn darts. Shell casings glinted in the dying light. A pistol lay half-buried near a hand that would never hold it again.
Gang shootout? His brain supplied helpfully. In what decade does organized crime have firefights in open fields? Did I wake up in 1920s Chicago?
He looked down.
Beneath him—under the pile he'd apparently been buried in—a woman's corpse. Gray trench coat. Eyes half-open. Her stiff hands clutched an empty, scattered bundle of cloth.
Swaddling.
His breath caught.
Liam raised his hands. Stared at them. Small. Tiny. His arms were sticks wrapped in skin so smooth it belonged on a toddler, not a man closing in on thirty.
He was three. Maybe four years old.
Time travel. I've time-traveled. Into a dead kid. Under a corpse. In a mass grave.
The universe's sense of humor was spectacular.
He had to move. Had to get away from the bodies. Liam scrambled on hands and knees, slipping twice in grass slick with things he refused to think about. His child-body betrayed him with every movement—weak, uncoordinated, useless.
He shoved through another wall of grass and froze.
On the hill above, backlit by the sunset: a silhouette. Four-legged. Massive. Eyes reflecting light that had no business being that color.
Beast.
The word arrived in his brain with prehistoric certainty.
Liam dropped. Let the grass swallow him. Pressed flat against the ground and prayed the thing on the hill hadn't seen him.
He turned his head slowly.
A gray tail protruded from the grass half a meter from his face.
Liam stopped breathing.
The tail led to a wolf. Not a dog. Not some mangy coyote. A two-hundred-pound apex predator currently gnawing on a human corpse with the sound effects of a butcher's nightmare.
How did I not HEAR that?
Liam inched backward. Kept his eyes locked on the wolf's matted fur, the way its shoulders moved as it tore flesh from bone.
The wolf stopped chewing.
Liam stopped moving.
It raised a hind leg. Scratched behind its ear like this was a normal Tuesday. Went back to its meal.
Liam let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding and retreated another inch.
Grass rustled to his left. Then his right.
Two more wolves emerged from the undergrowth, muzzles painted red, eyes glowing that particular shade of green that said you're food and we both know it.
Could this get any worse?
The first wolf—the one that had been dining—turned around. Licked its teeth. The expression on its face could only be described as a smile.
Yes. Yes it could.
Understanding crystallized with awful clarity: these three had known he was here the whole time. They'd been playing with their food. Saving the tenderest bits for dessert.
Sadistic bastards.
The wolves closed in. Low growls. Measured steps. Muscles coiling beneath fur.
Liam backed up until dead bodies stopped him. Nowhere left to run. Nowhere to hide.
The wolves advanced.
At the exact moment his heart should have exploded from panic, something changed. His racing thoughts slowed. Sharpened. A strand of his hair drifted into his peripheral vision.
It moved without wind.
Liam watched it float toward the center wolf with the lazy certainty of smoke. Except it wasn't just hair anymore. Something invisible wrapped around it. Bent it. Folded it into geometric precision—five points, like a star.
The hair settled into the wolf's ear and vanished in a flash of white.
A rose-gold pentagram burned on the inside of the wolf's ear.
Liam stared at himself—his human self—from two sets of eyes.
What the—
No time. The thought arrived with crystal urgency.
He—the wolf-him—lunged. Slammed into the wolf on the left, sent it sprawling. Pivoted. Caught the right-side wolf by surprise and bit down on its throat. Blood filled his mouth, hot and coppery and wrong but he didn't let go.
The third wolf recovered. Hit him from behind. Claws raked his back and God the pain was real, every nerve screaming.
Liam wrenched the dying wolf's neck sideways. Bone cracked. He spun to face his attacker.
Then immediately regretted his life choices.
Turned out, possessing a wolf didn't come with an instruction manual. The four-legged thing? Yeah. Not intuitive. His enemy—professional predator, graduate of Wolf University—had form, technique, and the home-field advantage.
They tumbled through grass slick with blood. Fangs and claws. His body—human body, useless meat sack—watched from the sidelines as Wolf-Liam lost ground inch by inch.
If Wolf me die here, Human me is next.
The wolf beneath him stopped twitching. One down.
Concentrate.
Liam's human body trembled. His heart sent spikes of ice-and-fire through his chest.
Focus.
A drop of blood on his arm lifted free. Floated. Just like the hair had. Invisible water—no, not water, something else—wrapped around it. The blood twisted mid-air into another five-pointed star.
The blood-star drifted toward the fighting wolves.
Wolf-Liam saw it coming. He roared—drew every reserve of strength from the body he barely controlled—and pinned his opponent. One paw on its skull. The other hooked its tongue, yanked it out between bloody teeth.
The blood-star landed on the exposed tongue.
White light flashed.
Human-Liam's vision went supernova. His body crumpled like someone had unplugged him.
The pentagram pattern spread across the wolf's tongue. Flickered. Faded.
Failed.
Shit.
Whatever this power was, it ran on batteries, and his three-year-old body had about as much juice as a dead calculator.
The enemy wolf bucked. Thrashed. Wolf-Liam's grip slipped.
No time to mourn the failure. No time to think. Just instinct and the copper taste of blood.
Wolf Liam bit down hard.
Fangs sank deep. The wolf's throat came apart in a spray of arterial red. It twitched. Spasmed. Went still.
Wolf-Liam stood over the corpse, panting. Two dead wolves. Victory.
Then that feeling came back—cold-hot-wrong—drilling into his human-body's chest. His vision swam. He tried to stand and fell.
Heart condition? He clutched his chest. Or did something just... enter me when the wolf died?
He remembered the pain when he'd first woken up. The sensation of something foreign worming into him. Looked at the scattered corpses hidden in the tall grass.
Oh.
Every death here. Every single one. They're all...
He exhaled slowly.
I survived.
Wolf-Liam lifted a paw to howl victory, but Human-Liam's face went pale.
The woman's body. The swaddling clothes. He'd assumed that he'd crawled out of that bundle. That she was his mother.
Except that swaddling was meant for newborns.
And he was three. Maybe four.
So where the hell did the original baby go?
More howls echoed through the darkening field. Closer now.
Liam looked at his wolf body. Looked at his human body. Looked at the encroaching night and the dozens of questions piling up faster than corpses.
"Well," he muttered through wolf-fangs and human-mouth simultaneously, "isn't this just fantastic."
The howling grew louder.